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Few seek an academic life in Germany who have either money to throw away on superfluities and external show, or who have such a rank to support as might stimulate their pride to expenses beyond their means.
It must be a cold heart that is not moved by the picture of a great soul striving “to renounce all pleasure and all superfluities,”—to copy literally, like St Francis, the portrait of his Master. But here, as everywhere, the human copy falls infinitely short of the divine Original. There is the loveliness of a true human life beneath all the picture of suffering presented to us in the Gospels.
A vineyard is busily tilthed and kept, and purged and cleaned of superfluities, and oft visited and overseen of the earth tilthers and keepers of vines, that it be not apaired neither destroyed with beasts, and is closed about with walls and with hedges, and a wait is there set in a high place to keep the vineyard that the fruit be not destroyed.
By retrenching a few superfluities in my life, I can return the four hundred francs Madame de Listomere has lent me in three years; so do not make yourself uneasy about them, my dear Cesar. I send you all I have in the world; hoping that this sum may help you to a happy conclusion of your financial difficulties, which doubtless are only momentary.
"As it is better to be in good health, being hard-pressed on a little truckle-bed, than to roll, and to be ill in some broad couch; so too it is better in a small competence to enjoy the calm of moderate desires, than in the midst of superfluities to be discontented." This, too, is a thought which many have expressed.
In this case he will be considered as censurable by many, because he will be looked upon as a dealer in the superfluities condemned by his own religion. The last occupation I shall notice is that of a silversmith. And here the censure will depend upon a contingency also. If a Quaker confines himself to the selling of plain silver articles for use, little objection can be raised against his employ.
Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a different stage.
Would you but even now, renouncing these practices, perform military service and act worthily of yourselves; would you employ these domestic superfluities as a means to gain advantage abroad; perhaps, Athenians, perhaps you might gain some solid and important advantage, and be rid of these perquisites, which are like the diet ordered by physicians for the sick.
Neither of us will soon forget that tramp by an unknown route over the mountains, encumbered as we were with a hundred and one superfluities which we had foolishly brought along to solace ourselves with in the woods; nor that halt on the summit, where we cooked and ate our fish in the drizzling rain; nor, again, that rude log house, with its sweet hospitality, which we reached just at nightfall on Mill Brook.
"Aha anti and nomos I understand well, if I except these dusty superfluities, I may say that your furnishings are really faultless. The quotations from Goethe are really more appropriate, although I could do without them." "I'll have them swept out," she said in playful submission. "You are a dear girl," he said playfully and passed his hand caressingly over her severely combed hair.
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